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Facebook's next attempt at clearing its name from any future political entanglements is apparently hiring people with national security clearances, according to Bloomberg. "Facebook plans to use these people -- and their ability to receive government information about potential threats -- in the company's attempt to search more proactively for questionable social media," the publication's source says. It makes sense, and given the role the social network played in he 2016 election, is a smart move.

Business Insider reports that Facebook appears to be testing a LinkedIn-like résumé/CV feature. The new addition was spotted by web developer Jane Manchun Wong and screenshots of the feature were posted on Twitter by The Next Web's Matt Navarra.

Yesterday, a campaign geared towards demonstrating just how common sexual assault and harassment are began to spread on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Alongside the hashtag #MeToo, women began posting their own stories of harassment in response to a prompt by Alyssa Milano.

Facebook has pledged more than £1 million to help turn British schoolchildren into "digital safety ambassadors." The scheme, created by Childnet International and The Diana Award, will teach students about social media, cyberbullying and the hazards of the wider internet. They will then act as a support group for their friends and fellow pupils, fielding questions and leading online safety initiatives in the classroom. Facebook says its investment will allow every UK secondary school to have its own digital safety ambassador, should they be interested in the project. In total, that could be an extra 4,500 pupils sharing good advice with their peers.

It's another week down and we're all a bit closer to death. Huzzah. While the moron-in-chief continues to systematically dismantle everything good and decent about our country, the tech industry did its part to help hasten that process along. The heads of Twitter and Facebook respectively showed that they're not just spineless incompetents but also tone deaf stooges, Tesla had to recall a metric shit-ton of Model Xs because sitting in the middle seat could kill you, and Porsche rolled out a new service to make the lives of the 1 percenters that much more luxurious. Numbers, because screw it, nothing matters.

Last year was the year that VR went mainstream. The Oculus Rift finally shipped to consumers, as did the HTC Vive and the PS VR. But even as the VR industry is finally starting to take off, it's already beginning to splinter. Before, we had phone-based VR like Samsung's Gear VR and Google's Daydream, and then higher-end PC models like the Rift and the Vive. Now, the standalone VR headset is emerging as a category unto itself. And it stands to make the VR landscape a lot more accessible -- and possibly more divisive -- than ever before.

Up until a week ago, the first thing I did every morning after waking up was reach for the nightstand and grab my iPhone. Then, after hitting the snooze on the alarm a couple of times, I'd open Twitter or Instagram and scroll through my feeds for 10-15 minutes before getting ready for work. Once dressed and prepared to face another day, I'd walk to the train, hop on, take my phone out and check social media again. For 40 minutes, almost the entire length of my commute, I scrolled through people's posts for what felt like an eternity. Wash, rinse, repeat -- save for the weekends. And I imagine many people can relate.

Imagine working at Facebook and being the person/people who added Stories to the social network after seeing the way they took off on Snapchat and Instagram. Then think about the fact that hardly anyone is using the feature. That probably explains the reasoning behind opening the section up to Pages. Yep, #brands are getting access to the evaporating, 24-hour shelf-life videos now, too. Maybe Facebook found a group that will actually use them?

The truth behind Facebook's involvement in Russian voter hacks continues to get more complicated. The social media company apparently knew about Russian meddling even before last year's US election. Mark Zuckerberg's company reported that 10 million people saw Russian political ads, and has handed over Russia-linked ads to Congress. According to a report in The Washington Post, however, Facebook recently scrubbed the internet of thousands of posts related to social media analyst Jonathan Albright's research that apparently concluded that at least twice as many people had seen the ads than Facebook reported.

The day I've been dreading for months is drawing near. On October 18th, the Department of Homeland Security's modified system of records is scheduled to go into effect. The updated policy would affect all US immigrants, whether they are new, existing or permanent residents or even naturalized citizens, and how they are identified by the government. More accurately, it would allow the DHS, Border Patrol and other immigration authorities to collect social media handles as part of an individual's official record. As someone who's working in the US on a visa, I was immediately worried about how it would affect my standing.

Earlier today, Oculus announced Go, its first-ever consumer-ready standalone headset. But it's actually been working on another standalone headset -- Project Santa Cruz -- for a while longer. I had a chance to try on a really early version of it last year, and it was so unfinished that an Oculus helper had to put it on for me. Today at Oculus Connect 4, I tried on the latest version of hardware as well as the new Santa Cruz controllers, and the difference is night and day. It felt like a completely finished product.

A month ago, Facebook revealed that a Russian group bought $100,000 worth of ads on the social network in an apparent effort to influence the 2016 US Presidential election. After more was revealed about the far-reaching impact of the ads, the social media titan handed them over to the House Intelligence Committee last week. Now Congress is planning to release the advertisements to the American public, according to CNBC -- but not before a November 1st hearing that will include Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Respawn Entertainment might be going back to its historic stomping grounds. In virtual reality. A quick tease from the Oculus Connect stage revealed that the team that made Call of Duty is working on what very well may be a VR take on wars of the past. Studio director Peter Hirschmann writes that it isn't Titanfall in VR, nor is it related to Star Wars, the game Respawn is working on for EA. "We really want to depict being a soldier in combat in a more fully fleshed-out and realistic way," CEO Vince Zampella says in the video below. No other details are available (not even a name) but the clip ends with a big "2019." Respawn has had a Rift development kit since at least 2013, so that could very well be a realistic release window.

Earlier this year, Facebook unveiled Spaces, its answer to social VR. In it, you could turn yourself into an animated avatar, and then interact with your friends and family in virtual hangouts and share 360-degree photos and videos. You could even snap a shot of yourself and your buddies with a virtual selfie stick. Today, the company is announcing a few new updates to make Spaces that much more enticing.

Oculus' virtual reality avatars are clever stand-ins, but they have a few glaring problems: most notably, you can't see them outside of Oculus' own platform. Thankfully, they're being set free. Oculus has revealed that the avatars will have cross-platform support in 2018, including Steam VR and Google's Daydream. Whether or not there are any limitations to use on other platforms isn't clear, but Oculus is promising tangible upgrades to the avatars themselves.

From the stage at Oculus Connect 4, Oculus' Nate Mitchell just announced Rift Core 2.0. It's designed around Touch, offering a motion-control-focused interface that apes a lot of what hackers have been doing with BigScreen. The big addition is Dash, which as its name implies, is a dashboard accessible from within any VR app or experience. It lets you use your desktop apps within VR, too. "It's a total game changer," Mitchell said. You can permanently pin something to the dashboard, too. "Every application can have its own virtual display," Mitchell said.

While the new standalone Oculus Go stole the spotlight at Facebook's Oculus 4 event in San Francisco, the company did also announced its plans to bring virtual reality into the office space with the "Oculus for Business bundle. It includes a Rift VR headset, a pair of Oculus Touch controllers, three spacial sensors, and three "facial interfaces" (the foam bits that rest against your face) as well as dedicated customer support and expanded licenses and warranties.

That summer sale on the Oculus Rift and Touch combo must have paid dividends. Oculus has announced that the price of a Rift and Touch combo has permanently dropped to $399/£399. That still isn't trivial, but it's inexpensive enough that you can get a high-end VR experience on your PC without paying as much as you would for a high-end video card. And now that the Rift bundle costs $200 less than the HTC Vive, it's safe to say that Oculus has the price advantage in VR outside of some Windows Mixed Reality headsets -- it may be tough to consider anything else until competitors offer price cuts of their own.

Oculus isn't limiting its new stand-alone VR experiences to the Go headset. It's introducing a much more refined version of Project Santa Cruz, the stand-alone VR headset it showed off last year. The new prototype is far sleeker, and importantly includes true six-degrees-of-freedom motion control. This is the first headset with full "inside-out" tracking, Oculus says. There are no wires and no external sensors for any movement tracking, whether you're tilting your head or waving your hands. There aren't many details as of this writing, but it'll take a while before you can strap one to your cranium -- it's reaching developers within a year.

It's also introducing brand new controllers, simply called the Santa Cruz controllers. They look a little similar to the Touch with a grip button and a touchpad, but they look different, too -- a little more streamlined and a little more compact. They rely on the same four ultralight infrared tracking sensors that the Santa Cruz headset itself uses.

Mark Zuckerberg wants virtual reality to be less isolating, so Facebook is working on "Venues." Think of them like VR social spaces where you can meet up with friends to watch concerts like the ones Live Nation is pumping out. Venues make a lot of sense when you consider Facebook's push for live video, sports and putting things like VR streams and 360-degree photos and video into the News Feed. Zuckerberg said that Venues will also play host to movie and TV premieres as well.

While Oculus has pioneered the modern consumer VR industry with the Oculus Rift and Samsung's Gear VR, it's been working hard on a truly wireless VR solution as well. Last year, Oculus teased that it was planning on a powerful standalone VR headset called "Project Santa Cruz," and earlier this year, there was news that Oculus was working on yet another tether-free headset codenamed "Pacific." Now, the company is finally ready to unveil its first standalone headset, that's a little more accessible than the Santa Cruz. This is the Oculus Go.

Guess what today is? If you said "Oculus Connect 4 keynote day" you were right. You also probably knew what day it was before reading this post. But I digress. Assuming you aren't in San Jose for the event, you'll need a place to watch it come 1 PM Eastern. Well, that's what the embed window below is for. And, if you have a Rift or Gear VR, you can watch the keynote address that way too. Speaking of, maybe expect a new Rift headset to be announced, and perhaps an update on the wireless one teased last year. Oh, and an awkward social VR demo is all but guaranteed. Catch y'all in the asynchronous-spacewarped metaverse.

Artificial intelligence has helped jump start everything from self-driving cars to soft robotics. As if that wasn't enough, it's also tearing down languagebarriers to bring the world closer together. But, at the same time, machine learning is dealing with its own, self-constructed walls. Last month, Facebook and Microsoft came together to target a major roadblock -- specifically the process of switching between machine learning frameworks, such as PyTorch and Caffe2. Their solution: An open-source AI ecosystem dubbed ONNX (or Open Neural Network Exchange), which allows developers to jump between AI engines at various stages of development. The tech titans claimed the Exchange would make machine learning "more accessible and valuable for everyone." And, they've apparently had no qualms in recruiting other big-name firms to help out. The latest additions to ONNX include IBM, Huawei, Intel, AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm -- companies that (to varying degrees) are also working within the field of AI.